


The Basement

by WarriorBeeoftheSea



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-21
Updated: 2019-04-21
Packaged: 2020-01-23 04:32:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18542335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WarriorBeeoftheSea/pseuds/WarriorBeeoftheSea





	The Basement

I meet her in a basement.  
(Later, a girl I don't remember tries to tell me it was the old morgue. -- What morgue? -- The morgue that this building used to have when it was a hospital. -- What? This was never a hospital. -- Sure it was, see the medical symbol on the elevator? -- I think that's just to let paramedics know that a stretcher can fit. -- Are you sure? -- This elevator is pretty roomy.) (We later find out that the elevator could, in fact, fit a stretcher.)  
It's an ordinary basement. Or I suppose it probably is more like a demoted first floor. It smells like old cheese. And it's where the vending machines live.  
She is between me and the vending machine.  
Her smile looks like a heart. The sides of her mouth pull up on her face, exposing her upper gums. If not for her well-attached upper frenulum, her mouth would look like an inverted triangle. It pulls down to her teeth in the center, thus heart-smile.  
A Texas smile, although I can't remember if I thought of it that way before I knew she was from Texas. I never met anyone from Texas.  
(Although she claims not to _really_ be from Texas. Despite having lived there. And her family still living there. And having gone through 12 years of school there. I think you have to own a cowboy hat and a gun before you can be "from Texas.")  
Short bleached blonde messy hair (she insists it has leftover purple spots but I can't see them) and a heart-shaped face to go with that heart-shaped smile, she is just my type and manic-pixie-dreams her way into my attention and I forget about the soda I am trying to buy.  
Then she tells me she was bi, and I know it's all over.  
(A short taxonomy of my disillusionment re: my dating pool at the age of 18: Lesbian means bi. Bi means straight. Straight means religious or prudish or both. No one wants to date me, not even people who theoretically could want to. It's not me, it's my gender.)  
I filter her claimed bisexuality through my cynical framework, and mentally declare her straight. But, like, open-minded straight who wouldn't try to save me, or worry I was checking her out.  
(I mean, I _am_ checking her out.)  
Two years and nine months later, she sits on my bed staring at a residential student survey in her hand. "Sexual Orientation" is unmarked.  
"You can leave it blank if you want." -- "I want to fill it in. I just… don't know." -- "Well, we can eliminate straight, right?" (Right!? Don't give me a complex, please.)  
Back in the basement: We play Never Have I Ever with some other students, my soda long forgotten. It should be easy because I've never done anything, but that just makes it harder. On my turn I say that. She smiles at me with her Texas heart-shaped smile -- "Me too. So it should be easy." It still isn't, but the smile distracts me and makes my heart beat faster.  
"I've never gone out with a guy."  
(Random straight girl bystander: "Is that a euphemism? Is going out a crazy new sex act? Have I done it?" -- "No…")  
She hasn't either.  
The turn goes around the circle and we also determine that neither of us has been ejaculated on. (What a relief!)  
Then it's her turn. She's never been to Europe. I want to ask where she has been, but her turn is over and that's not how the game works. I don't even really even know her at all.  
Nine months later in this same basement room I kiss her for the first time. Or she kisses me. It's unclear. We've been revolving around each other for agonizing weeks.  
(It's not really the first time we've kissed, but the real first time was so awful it nearly put us off the whole thing. A fumbled pressing of dry lips together in my room, followed by panic in the bathroom, and then it's over and hardly worth dwelling on. We were watching Hedwig and the Angry Inch so I could write about it in my final paper for film class. At the end of the night I had no idea how to fit the movie into my thesis, or the awful kiss into my unmitigated desire for this woman.)  
We're watching Saturday Night Live, and Samuel L. Jackson is hosting. Her lips slide messily across mine and we pull apart to giggle when SLJ says that his New Year's resolution is to Continue to Kick Ass.  
(This remains my own resolution every year after.)  
We kiss again and again and again, and my heart lurches and I worry I might throw up. We miss all of SNL and several episodes of cartoons. We come up for air to sleep and go to class and take our finals and eat, and then we're back at it over a movie the next night. I kiss her so much that week that I remember the taste of her mouth while I'm away from her, and I blush.  
The same week we kiss I think about her on my break from my job cooking burgers, and my heart absolutely clenches. I wonder if I'm in love or just having a panic attack. I've never experienced either.  
I feel that same heart clench days later in the car on my way out of the state. I realize too late what it is.  
I never go back to the basement, although she does years later to host her TA office hours there. When she tells me this, I wonder if she thinks about my tongue in her mouth while explaining Kierkegaard to first year philosophy students.


End file.
